


Chimera

by Monstrous_Femme



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, this is like 80 percent character study and 20 percent femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 02:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14155059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monstrous_Femme/pseuds/Monstrous_Femme
Summary: She is part girl, part monster, and moving forward is a statistical improbability.A Character Study of Alice Quinn.





	Chimera

Every sound is a scream. 

Every scream is silent.

When she’s fucking Quentin, she is thinking about this: how a universe so vast and abundant can look her in the eye and stab her through it, how the punishment designed for Quentin for killing a God fits her so perfectly.

Maybe Alice had killed God, the moment she became powerful enough to rip open a man’s shirt and watch him dissolve into moths.

Maybe they were right to take it all away.

*

As the weeks go by, it becomes easier to act human. She is a good girl. She raises her hand before she speaks in class, and never turns in an assignment late. She tries to forget how much she’s forgotten. It won’t help her here.

Alice Quinn is a good student. Alice Quinn eats bacon for breakfast every morning, feeling the grease coat her tongue and the lining of her stomach. Alice Quinn is in love with Quentin.

And that’s all well and good, it really is, but honestly, she can’t say for sure if she _is_ Alice Quinn, not anymore. 

At nights she dreams of bright, beautiful lights. She dreams of a door to magic that lets in everything she could ever want, everything she’s spent months mourning the loss of.

She dreams of sinking her teeth into flesh and watching the blood drain out.

*

Her father dies, and she is almost sorry. If she could take it all back, find another way to kill the Beast—

She’d do the exact same thing, and she wouldn’t apologize for it, and if she could, she’d find a way to stop Quentin from bringing back her shade. 

She knows that she is healing, that someday soon she’ll be Alice again or maybe something just to the left of Alice, something close enough that nobody will be able to tell, not unless they look very closely. 

There are many ways to stop someone from looking closely, and she knows every one of them.

*

“I could use magic, and you have it. Why _do_ you have it?”

If the words come out angry, it’s because she is angry. Julia has something beautiful and precious and whenever she starts to use it, she seems afraid of it, as though it might burn through her skin.

If Alice had magic back, she wouldn’t waste time being afraid. 

She pushes Julia to search further, pushes back against the lack of answers. Knowledge has always been her armor in a world of cruelty and chaos and now she needs it more than ever. Julia has no right to refuse to look. She has no right to withhold this.

And then, just like that, “If I could give it to you, I would.”

Like magic is something small and easy to trade away, a small favor to your best friend’s ex. She knows that if Julia has time to think it through, she’ll change her mind. 

The desperation seeps into her voice before she has time to stop it. “What if you could?”

*

Alice Quinn is a small and lowly creature.

Alice Quinn should have known better than to trust herself with magic. 

It was the problem with a conscience, the pain that comes from hurting another person. If she didn’t have a conscience, she could have kept the magic. She’d strip it all away, send her shade back to the underworld where it belonged and let herself learn, but to do that she’d have to stop caring about what she’d do to the others, and for that to be true, her shade would already have to be gone.

Catch fucking 22. 

When Julia’s eyes finally open, the words crawl out of her mouth like ants spilling through a crack in the wall. “I transferred it all back,” she says, wishing she can pretend this was to help, wishing she could say it was for any reason besides that she couldn’t hold onto it and stay alive. 

Julia tells her they’re even, like she’s not on the way to becoming a goddess while Alice is caught somewhere between human and monster. She tells her they’re even, because Julia Wicker has always been part-goddess and Alice Quinn has always been part-niffin and that’s just the way of the world. 

When she asks Julia what she’s going to do with the magic, Alice isn’t angry, only curious. Nothing too big to handle, just the curiosity of an alcoholic asking about the quality of a cocktail they’re not allowed to touch.

*

The Library is an act of desperation, even more so than the magic transfer, but it’s working.

Then they ask her to hurt Julia, and she can feel cockroaches crawling across her skin at the thought. She’s hurt people before, more people than she cares to remember or count, but this is Julia. The girl who meditates because she heard a bird fall out of its nest and she knows she can return it.

Every scream is silent, but Julia hears them all.

*

The night before they open the door to magic, Alice finds herself outside of Julia’s room, unable to knock, unable to even move. The door swings open, like she always knew it would, and Julia is there.

“What do you need?” Julia asks, and it’s not the sound of a parent she’s not allowed to ask questions of, it’s not the sound of a teacher who knows she’s the smartest in the room, it’s just Julia. 

“Anything,” Alice whispers. “Anything you can give me, please. I can’t go back to being a girl and I can’t go back to being a monster and I—can you please just help me move on with my fucking life?”

Julia stares at her with eyes like the full moon, and all of a sudden Alice is reaching for her, fingers slipping into Julia’s carefully put-together hair, lips touching lips as she begs for answers that may not exist, not here or anywhere in the universe.

And Julia is kissing back, lips soft against hers.

Tomorrow they will bring back magic, and she might become a monster again, or she might go back to being the girl in the front row of the classroom, desperate to prove her worth. She might be a niffin, or Alice, or both, or neither.

Right now, she is a girl who is being kissed by a goddess, and for a moment she is free from captivity by either the past or the future.


End file.
